I’m sorry, I love you, sweetheart, but the indisputable fact is that being an FBI agent is simply not a suitable job for a Yale graduate. There are so many other schools you could have gone to for that.”
Jamming the phone between his shoulder and his right ear, he worked at knotting his tie. “Hello, Mrs. Vader, is little Darth home?”
“Please, Connor, don’t make me laugh. I’ve got all my makeup on and I’ll break my face. I just want you to listen to me for one moment.” She paused, and accepted the silence as evidence he was listening to her. “You know you have responsibilities. I’m the only mother you have and you’re not treating me very nicely.”
Someday, he swore to himself, someday when she got on this guilt roll, he was going to summon up the courage to tell her that he was a fully grown adult and she could no longer treat him like a little boy, and then slam down the phone in her ear. Someday, but not today. “Now it’s your turn to listen to me, okay? I got the official word from Dear Abby. Here, I got it right here, let me read it to you. Dear Wonderful Son Who Loves His Sainted Mother, playing golf with your mother is not considered a family responsibility. There you have it. And Dear Abby doesn’t lie.”
LeeBeth O’Brien was not a woman who surrendered easily. “Even when that aging mother begs her only son to spend just a few small hours with her?”
“Nice try, Mops. I like that reading.” She had become “Mops” about a year after Connor O’Brien Sr. had died at his desk at Chase Manhattan. Adding her late husband’s role to her own, she began coaching Connor’s Little League team, taking him and his friends on camping trips, and even learned how to drive a manual transmission so she could teach him. And in exchange, all she asked from him was that she be foremost in his thoughts every single minute of his life.
Because LeeBeth was fulfilling both parental roles, mom and pop, her precocious son had created the appropriate title for her. Initially he had tried “Pom,” but they both agreed that conjured up the image of a sad cheerleader, so “Mops” she became. This particular morning she was trying to convince him to come up to Chappaqua for the weekend to play with her in the club’s annual parent and son tournament, which for years had been the father and son tournament—until she threatened a lawsuit, at which time single mothers and their sons were admitted. Thus far she remained the only woman to actually participate.
Very few people in the bureau knew that Connor O’Brien was the son of a successful investment banker and had his own trust fund. Or that he was a Yale graduate. While once all applicants to the bureau were required to have a college degree—and preferably an advanced degree—as well as three years of law enforcement experience, that had been slightly relaxed over the previous decade. The bureau now commonly made exceptions for individuals with desirable skills, from computer programming to the ability to translate Slavic languages. But while all agents were still required to have at least an undergraduate degree, very few of them had graduated from an Ivy League school with a major in philosophy, and even fewer of them had a trust fund fat enough to support them comfortably for the remainder of their lives.
If O’Brien’s family and friends wondered at his choice of a career, he certainly never did. When asked by people who knew his background why he’d joined the bureau, he told them seriously, “Because I couldn’t hit a good curveball.” Connor really couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he decided to apply to the FBI. He realized it was an odd choice to make for a politically liberal Yale graduate at the height of the Vietnam War, but somehow it made perfect sense to him. “Bridging the gap,” he’d explained to his mother. Bringing America together. Healing the societal wounds. He had used every cliché to explain it, but the bottom-line truth was that it seemed like it might be important—as well as interesting and fun. His father had provided him with financial security, which he interpreted to mean that his father had not wanted him tied to a desk doing a job he hated, the position in which he had found himself. Maybe more important than anything else, each day would be different.
So when he ended up with a high number in the draft lottery, he applied to the bureau and was accepted. LeeBeth thought it was an immature decision as well as a ridiculous thing to do. She brought in her heaviest emotional weapons to try to talk him out of it. Enlisting her late husband’s friends, she managed to get him offers to join the management training program at Chase, Xerox, and the State Department—each of which he instantly rejected.
The night before he left for the training school at Quantico she told him honestly, “I tried very hard to raise you to be able to make your own decisions. And today I have to admit that I very much regret that.” But she was sitting in the bleachers at Quantico the day he graduated from the academy. And completely true to her nature, she’d brought with her to Virginia an attractive young woman she’d met at a Bucky Fuller lecture at the 92nd Street Y. But even a decade later she still held tight to the hope that the FBI might just be a phase he was going through. A very long phase.
“One round of golf,” she pleaded. “Is that too much for a son to do for his widowed mother? Just play on Saturday.”
“I love you, Mops,” he said, gently hanging up the phone. “I’ll call you later.”
Once again Russo was waiting for him outside the building with coffee from the cart on Broadway. “You know, you could come inside,” he told her. “I had the apartment cleaned just last year. Most likely you won’t get those diseases anymore.” Then he added thoughtfully, “Just to be safe, though, you probably want to stay out of the kitchen.”
Initially Slattery had turned down their request to spend a second day investigating the link between the missing professor and the mob. But when Russo started dropping phrases like “national security” and “communist involvement,” he got the hint. Slattery put a relief team in the overnight slot. Team II was thrilled to work days. Watching a locked door at 3 a.m. can get pretty boring.
Conveniently O’Brien lived only a few blocks from the professor, so they took the shoe leather express. It was one of those good-to-be-alive-and-in-the-city mornings, with just enough chill in the air to snap you awake. Connor had proved to himself years earlier that he was not one of those lucky people gifted with the ability to sip coffee and move at the same time without spilling it on their shirt, no matter how small the edge they tore off the plastic lid. But he watched with admiration as Russo did exactly that and made it look easy. Show-off, he thought to himself. If it were his decision, he would have sat on his front stoop in the flush of morning and enjoyed the cup of coffee, but Russo was in a hurry. Sure, he thought, it’s easy to be in a hurry when you can sip coffee and walk at the same time. So as they walked, he held the cup far enough away from his body to avoid the inevitable coffee splash, and when they reached the corner, he dropped it into an overflowing trash basket.
Professor Peter Gradinsky lived on the third floor of a five-story brownstone. Whoever was in his apartment buzzed O’Brien and Russo into the building without asking them to identify themselves. O’Brien guessed the intercom was broken. The turn-of-the-century building was well kept. As they climbed the stairs, O’Brien noted that someone had put flowers in vases inside each of the coffin corners—recesses in the walls on the landings to allow mourners carrying a coffin to complete the turn. There were expensively framed oil paintings—real oil paintings rather than the tacky reproductions commonly used for decoration—on the walls, so O’Brien figured the tenants probably knew and trusted each other. That meant there wasn’t a lot of turnover in the building.
Gradinsky’s door was opened by a tall, thin woman, wearing modest glasses, whose long, narrow face was framed by sensible light brown hair. O’Brien guessed fifty-two but was pretty sure she would claim she was forty-five if anybody asked but nobody ever did. Russo noticed that her prim white cotton blouse was wrinkled and suspected she’d slept in it. “Yes?” she asked.
O’Brien had learned a lesson with Geri Simon. This time he let Russo speak first. Obviously there was some kind of woman-to-woman communication he hadn’t been aware of previously. “Mrs. Gradinsky?” Russo guessed correctly. Russo then introduced herself and O’Brien.
Grace Gradinsky looked at her quizzically. “Yes?”
“We’d like to speak with you about your husband,” Russo continued, “Peter Gradinsky?”
Grace Gradinsky’s face remained impassive. Neither agent could read anything into it. “Is he all right?” she asked calmly. “Has something happened to him?”
“No, we don’t think so,” O’Brien said. “Mind if we come in for a couple of minutes?”
She stepped back and allowed them to come into the apartment. They stood under the graceful arch separating the entrance foyer from the living room. Russo said bluntly, “Mrs. Gradinsky, we got a report that your husband is missing. Is that true?”
Gees Louise, Russo, O’Brien thought, take it easy there, partner. You’re using all the charm of a truck.
But in response Grace Gradinsky showed her first trace of emotion. She closed her eyes and swallowed while pushing back a nonexistent curl. Then she caught herself. Looking directly at Russo, she demanded somewhat defensively, “Who told you that?”
The manner in which she asked that question made it pretty clear to O’Brien that she thought she already knew the answer. The fact that she asked “who” rather than “how” or “where” told him a lot. “Let me explain something to you,” he said in the most confidential tone he could muster. “Sometimes, when we’re in the middle of one investigation, we come across information about something totally different. So, unfortunately, I can’t . . . you understand, I can’t really tell you how we found out about this. Obviously we did, though. So now what we’re trying to do is make sure everybody’s okay.”
As most people did, she responded in a tone mirroring the tone he used when asking the question. “And then you want to ask him some questions, right?”
He nodded. “Honestly it’s nothing that big.” Then he said it again for emphasis. “Honest.”
“All right,” she decided. “Come in.” She led them into the living room. A plush sofa and two comfortable-looking wingback chairs were arranged around a large oak armoire, which O’Brien assumed contained the TV set. Bookshelves covered the far wall from floor to ceiling. There were two additional rooms and a bathroom beyond the living room. Their doors were closed, but, O’Brien thought, one of those rooms was probably used as an office. The apartment was tastefully immaculate. Every object seemed to be precisely where Ralph Lauren might have placed it. Even the books were perfectly aligned; not a single book was laid casually on top of other books or pushed against the wall. Nothing in the apartment looked new, but everything appeared well cared for. This was the type of apartment, he decided, that you could just move right into and you’d know exactly where the laundered and folded towels would be found.
The two agents sat side by side on the sofa. There was a highly polished wooden coffee table in front of them. Grace Gradinsky took the easy chair to their right, in front of the windows. She sat almost perfectly upright, as if balancing an invisible book on her head, and asked O’Brien, “Could you tell me again what is it you found out?”
“It’s not that much,” he admitted. “Just that he was supposed to meet some people and didn’t show up. Now they can’t find him. The people up at Columbia told us he hadn’t been there the last few days.” He didn’t mind that she was questioning him. Answering questions was an effective way of establishing a relationship with a subject. Make the interview as conversational as possible. Give up a little in hopes of getting a lot.
She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. “He hasn’t been home in three days,” she said evenly. “I don’t know what to do, Detective . . .”
“Agent,” he corrected. “We’re FBI, not NYPD.”
Three nights earlier, she began, Peter had been working at home early in the evening when the phone rang. It was about seven-thirty, maybe a little later. She had answered it and a man whose voice she didn’t recognize asked to speak to him. “They were only on the phone for a few seconds. Then Peter told me he had to go somewhere. He didn’t tell me where, he didn’t tell me who he was meeting. He didn’t tell me anything. He just said he’d be back in a little while, gathered up some papers, and left. That was it.” She looked away and whispered, “That was it.”
As gently as possible, Russo asked her why she hadn’t called the police.
“I don’t . . . I mean, I don’t know,” she said, fumbling for the right words. “Peter is such a . . . he’s such a shy man. I was certain he was going to come back any minute. And I knew if I made a big fuss about him, he would just . . . he wouldn’t understand. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I promise you, it would if you knew him.”
“The man who called,” O’Brien asked. “You remember anything different, anything unusual about his voice?”
She considered that. “Well, he did have a pretty strong Russian accent. I mean, all that he said to me was, like . . .” In a bad parody of a Russian accent she said in a masculine voice, “‘I speak please to Professor Peter.’ That was all he said.”
Russo asked, “Did Peter talk to him in English or Russian?”
“Russian. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about. I only know the tourist words. You know, nyet, dos vadanya . . .”
For the next hour Grace Gradinsky seemingly did her best to answer all their questions. Peter Gradinsky had been born in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents had settled there after immigrating from the Ukraine. His father worked in the paint box at a General Motors plant. His parents primarily spoke Russian at home, which is where he had learned the language, and then he majored in it at Colgate. They had met at Colgate and had been married for twenty-eight years. They’d lived in this apartment for more than twenty years; it was rent-controlled and the landlord really wanted them to move out. They did not own a car. They had no children. No, Peter had not been acting any differently recently. Organized crime? No, that’s ridiculous, Peter didn’t know people like that. No, he didn’t seem unusually nervous when he left the apartment that night. No, he’d never just disappeared like this before. The longest he’d ever been gone without an explanation was a few hours. As far as she knew, he was not in contact with Soviet government officials. No, he was not spending any more money than usual—she actually laughed out loud at that question—and there certainly had not been any unexplained deposits made to their bank account. Yes, she always held on to both their passports; Peter didn’t even know where she kept them. She thought it might be important that on occasion he worked as a translator for the State Department. She didn’t really know what level security clearance he had; Secret, she thought. At least that’s what was stamped on those folders he brought home.
“Excuse me?” Russo asked somewhat incredulously. “You’re telling us that Peter brought home folders that were marked Secret?”
Grace appeared unsettled. “That isn’t all right?” She looked at Connor. “He told me he had a clearance for all those papers. He just translated them, that’s all. He wouldn’t even let me look at them.” She smiled at the memory. “I used to say to him, ‘Who am I going to tell, Peter? My mother the big famous spy?’”
O’Brien could hear the tremor in Laura’s voice as she asked, “Mrs. Gradinsky, are any of those folders here now?”
“Oh no, I’m sure of that. It didn’t happen that often. I mean, he only brought them home a few times. He just isn’t doing much work for the government anymore.”
“Those times that he did bring them home, where’d he keep them?”
“In his desk. In his office.” She pointed toward the closed doors. Behind one of them, obviously, was the professor’s office. “He put a little lock thing on the drawer. He didn’t tell me the combination, but that’s where he kept them.”
Connor O’Brien leaned forward and listened intently to her answers. As always, he took copious notes, but within minutes of beginning this questioning he was certain of one thing: Her answers were total bullshit. This woman knew substantially more than she intended to reveal, and nothing short of pulling out her badly chewed fingernails with a pair of pliers would make her tell them the truth.
An experienced agent can tell pretty quickly whether or not a subject is being truthful. Answers consist of a lot more than words; what’s important is the pauses between those words, the attempt to inject phony emotion into them, body language—unusually egotistical or arrogant people like to lock eyes when lying to you as a means of proving their intellectual superiority—and even demonstrating extreme concern by being overly cooperative. People telling the truth just tell the truth, whereas people who are lying try to act like they’re telling the truth, usually with about the same success as a drunk trying to act sober.
So to O’Brien the first question to be answered was why she was lying. Everything else flowed from that. When Russo had finished compiling a list of the professor’s co-workers who would know his normal routine, O’Brien asked, “How is his health, Mrs. Gradinsky? Blood pressure, cholesterol, things like that?”
She actually laughed at that question. Peter Gradinsky was the most health conscious human being she had ever known. Obsessive. Fanatical. That’s why she laughed, she explained. “He thinks there’s a vitamin that can cure anything. You wouldn’t believe how many pills he swallows every day. Red ones, green ones, you just name it, he takes it.”
O’Brien smiled as if in recognition. “I know. I know exactly what you mean. My father was very much like that. There must have been a thousand of those little bottles all over the place.” That was a complete lie, of course, and even he was amazed how easily the words slid off his tongue. But then he made his point: “So where’d Professor Gradinsky keep all those bottles? If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at them.”
Surprisingly this was the question that stopped her. She coughed nervously, then recovered her balance and explained that he kept his pills locked in the same desk drawer in which he kept the documents he brought home.
She waited expectantly for Connor’s next question. But he just sat there, looking right at her, as if waiting for her to continue her response. That was an interviewing technique he often used. Silence makes most people uncomfortable, creating a vacuum that they invariably fill with additional details. “I mean, I don’t know the combination,” she finally added. “You know Peter,” she said, then caught herself. “Well, you don’t. But as I told you, he’s a very private man. He doesn’t like anyone touching his things. Even me. You should just see how upset he gets if I look in his pants pockets when I do the laundry.”
Rather than being upset that her husband was missing, O’Brien realized, she was furious. He could feel her anger swelling as she continued, “It’s like I committed a federal crime. Days’ll go by and he won’t talk to me. And for what?” She looked to Laura for support. “For looking in his pockets?” Just as suddenly as the outburst began, she caught herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, deflated, “I’m just . . . I’m upset is all.”
She composed herself, brushing off her blouse as if it were covered with crumbs. She brushed too hard and too long. Russo saw the tears forming in her eyes. “I love Peter,” she said finally, and added emphatically, “Really I do. But sometimes . . . sometimes I don’t understand why he does the things he does.”
They understood, Russo said supportively.
“Would you do me a favor, Mrs. Gradinsky?” O’Brien asked politely, handing her his notebook. “Would you write down for me the medicines he takes, and maybe the name and phone number of his doctor and the drugstore where he fills his prescriptions?”
While Grace provided that information, Connor excused himself and used the bathroom. When Grace finished, Russo asked her for a recent photograph of her husband that she could keep. The best Grace could offer was a picture of the Gradinskys with another couple taken in a crowded restaurant. “That’s him on my right,” she said, pointing to him, “the shorter man.”
When Connor returned, she gave him back his notebook, in which she had listed all his pills and vitamins. In return, both agents handed her their business cards, the expensive ones with the full-color raised FBI seal and the New York headquarters phone number. They asked her to contact them the moment he returned, promised to keep her informed of any progress they made in their search, and finally Russo suggested, “Mrs. Gradinsky, don’t you think it would make sense for you to file a missing persons report with the NYPD?”
“Oh no no, not yet,” she responded instantly. “Peter’s all right, I’m sure of it. Really, you just don’t know how angry he’d be with me when he found out I went to the police. Please don’t do anything. Just . . . just give him a few more days, please. If he isn’t back, I’ll do it. I will, honest I will.”
“Wow, that was a strange one,” Laura said as they walked to his garage to pick up his car. “I’ve seen people get more upset about their cat getting loose. She’s a tough one, isn’t she?”
“I think she knows where he is,” O’Brien responded, “or at least she has a pretty good idea. She knows he’s safe too. That’s why she doesn’t want to get the cops involved. And wherever he is, he took off on his own. If he was running, he was running real slow. Anybody who takes the time to pack all his pills isn’t in a big hurry to leave.”
“I thought she said they were locked in his desk.”
“Sure they were. Except that when I was in the bathroom, I checked the medicine cabinet. Three of the shelves were crammed with pill bottles, aspirin, all kinds of cold crap—some of it expired two years ago—hair spray, all the usual stuff. You couldn’t fit one more thing on any of those shelves. But the bottom shelf was empty. Obviously the professor cleaned it out.”
As they walked along, occasionally their shoulders touched. It was casual, accidental, natural, and neither of them said anything about it and moved farther away.
“So what are you thinking?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know exactly. I mean, let’s look at it: We got a missing college professor that the mob’s more interested in finding than his own wife. And after meeting her I’m wondering that if I was Gradinsky, who would I rather have find me?”
Driving downtown, they debated their next move. Officially this was the end of their investigation. Unless they could come up with a compelling reason to continue, it was back to the Country Club. Slattery couldn’t justify giving them any additional time without opening up the great gates of the bureaucracy and letting loose the flood of paperwork that would inevitably flow through.
If there is a single aspect of the job despised by just about every agent, it is the paper trail. Every aspect of every investigation has to be reported and recorded, every plan has to be approved, every dollar has to be accounted for with receipts, and every additional request has to be put on paper. People often ask me how difficult it was for me to work undercover inside the mob for six years. It was real tough, I tell them, real tough, but it did have at least one wonderful benefit: For six beautiful years I didn’t have to fill out a single form. Except for the fact that I could have been uncovered and whacked at any minute, I was in agent heaven. I rarely took any notes—I couldn’t risk the wiseguys finding them in my apartment—and I wore a wire fewer than a dozen times. I remembered as much as I possibly could about every day, every conversation, and as often as was safe and necessary I spoke with my case agent and gave him all the details. The case agents with whom I worked were responsible for generating the mountains of paperwork.
The fact that the mob was looking for a Columbia University Russian professor was interesting, but certainly not of sufficient importance to justify a commitment of substantial government resources. Simply stated, no one was going to make a federal case out of it. But for Russo, and only slightly less so for O’Brien, it offered the lure of opportunity. For at least the next few months they were stuck in the Country Club. While they were part of a potentially important investigation, laying the foundation for an attack on the entire structure of organized crime in New York City, their role was little more than record-keeper. They spent their days and nights noting who came to the social club and when they left and who farted into the microphone and laughed about it. After perhaps another six months spent listening to the same people telling the same jokes they would testify at numerous trials that the official transcriptions were true and accurate reports of legal wiretaps.
It was a necessary assignment in the building of a successful career, but Laura Russo was just too ambitious to sit back and let the bureaucracy control her destiny. There had to be a way to convince Slattery that there was substantially more to this case than what had thus far surfaced.
O’Brien listened politely as she laid out the arguments she would use with Slattery. He had already decided to support her, but his reasons were less professional than personal. Things do happen that way on the job. Simply put, he was having a good time working with her.
If asked, O’Brien would have claimed that he firmly supported the relatively new movement for women’s equality, but it was still very hard for him to completely overcome the evolutionary process that had created the American male. He would definitely have objected to being called a male chauvinist pig—he was thrilled to be in the women’s camp—but the undeniable fact was that when she was working intently, she really was cute. Even during the long interview with Grace Gradinsky, even after sitting through the four-hour mandatory sensitivity training course, even after competing against female agents at Quantico, he just couldn’t help appreciating the way her white silk blouse followed the contours of her lovely breasts. As much as he tried to resist, several times that afternoon he found himself stealing looks at her, trying hard to make it appear as if he were looking at the books behind her. “Look,” he told her as they parked in the bureau’s underground garage, “I think I got a good idea about how we can get this case going.”
“Tell me,” she said, and her face brightened.
Several minutes later they were sitting in Slattery’s office. “National security,” he said to Slattery, invoking the holy phrase.
Slattery sighed deeply. That was just about the last thing he wanted to hear that afternoon. The good news for O’Brien and Russo was that Slattery was having a very bad day. Some clerk in Human Resources was giving him a hard time about his 67-E, his personnel file. Slattery was just beginning to think about retiring—he had his years in—so he wanted to make sure his records were in good order. That way if he made the decision, he would have no difficulty getting his pension and health insurance benefits. As it turned out, it was a very good thing he’d initiated the process.
According to the bureau, Special Agent James Slattery did not exist. His 67-E was gone. The clerk had assured him that this was not really a problem, that almost definitely his records had been taken upstairs to be transferred to a computer disk, and that whoever took the file just forgot to leave a red slip in its place. Nothing to worry about, the clerk said.
“Let me make sure I’ve got this right. You’re telling me that officially I don’t exist and that I shouldn’t worry about it,” Slattery had asked incredulously.
“Oh, come on, of course you exist,” the clerk replied. “Just not on paper.”
Slattery was furious. He wanted to know exactly what he had to do to make sure the problem was solved. Actually, the clerk told him, that was sort of the tricky part. Because officially he didn’t exist, he couldn’t make any requests to Human Resources. Somebody else would have to make that request for him.
Slattery had slammed down the phone without resolving the problem. He hated himself for yelling at clerks, but how the hell could they lose his entire career? It was embarrassing. Americans throughout the world were relying on the efficiency of the FBI to fight crime and protect them from domestic upheaval. Or whatever they were calling the fight against communism. But according to the bureau, he had officially become the man who never was. Real efficient.
And then O’Brien and Russo were sitting across from him suggesting they open up a major new investigation. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
That’s when O’Brien invoked the magic words “national security.”
Slattery buried his face in his hands and just couldn’t help laughing. What else could happen to him today? National fucking security. The two words that throughout the forty-year cold war opened the vault. “Oh, please,” he practically pleaded, “don’t do this to me today.”
O’Brien knew that he had him on the run. “C’mon, Jim, look at what we got. There’s something going on here. One, a Russian-language professor who occasionally translates secret documents for Uncle Sam suddenly turns up missing. We don’t know what kind of documents, we don’t know the last time he worked. We don’t know if he owed anything to anybody or what he might have had in his possession. We know diddly-squat is what we know. Two, we do know that the mob is looking for him, but we don’t know why. Three, his wife says that the night he disappeared he got a phone call from a man speaking with a Russian accent and responded by putting on his coat and walking out the door. Certainly sounds a little Manchurian Candidate to me. Four, he’s been gone at least three days and she still hasn’t reported it to the cops. It doesn’t even look like she called the college to find out if he was showing up to teach his classes. Which he isn’t, by the way. And we’re pretty sure she knows a lot more than she told us . . .”
“She definitely wasn’t too upset that he was gone,” Russo added.
“Five, we’re guessing now, but it is possible somebody warned her not to make a big deal out of it and he’d be fine.” He paused and looked at Russo. “Anything else?”
“He left on his own, we know that,” she added. “He took time to pack all his pills, so he had to know he was going to be gone for at least a few days. And he’s definitely connected.”
Slattery had really tried to pay attention, but one thought kept flashing in his mind, bright as one of those neon signs in Times Square: I’m the fucking invisible FBI agent! But still he managed to hear enough of O’Brien’s earnest pitch to know there was very little there. Put it all together and it sounded an awful lot like a guy who owed something to somebody had just taken off. Only a few years earlier Slattery had worked with the NYPD on a joint task force investigating the Michele Sindona case. Sindona, the pope’s banker who had been indicted for looting the Franklin National Bank, had been kidnapped on 42nd Street in the middle of the afternoon, about a week before his bank fraud trial was set to begin. It turned out that Sindona had fled to Sicily to avoid the trial until the chief witness against him could be murdered. He was hidden by the Gambino family.
That kind of convenient disappearance happened pretty often, although maybe not on that level, and the hideout was usually in a place like Red Hook in Brooklyn or Flushing, Queens, rather than Naples. But Slattery knew that the mob only searched for people with whom it did business. If forced to guess about this guy, Jim Slattery would have put his chips on gambling losses.
But he listened to O’Brien and Russo with as much enthusiasm as he could fake. The relationship between agents in the field and their supervisors can be more complicated than a large family with an inherited fortune. Often it is symbiotic. The agent in the field is dependent on his or her support team. A supervisor can get up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and end a six-month investigation on a whim. But the career of the street agent or supervisor might also hinge on an agent’s work. If an agent screws up, the support team might sink with him. So for a case agent it’s a balancing act between the bureau’s rules and the needs of his people.
There are good and bad supervisors, case agents, and support teams. It really is the luck of the schedule. There are wimps afraid to take a step outside the box without permission from Washington in triplicate. But there are just as many people who would take a bullet to protect their operation. Well, maybe an administrative bullet, but if it came down to it, they would risk their careers to give the agents in the field the support they needed to succeed.
Generally the agents who worked with Slattery respected him. O’Brien knew that Slattery got all the punch lines. In this situation, for example, he knew that they didn’t even have enough evidence to interest the Mayberry PD, much less convince the bureau to commit time and resources to the investigation. And he had no doubt Slattery knew it too. But he was also pretty confident Slattery would get the real message: Trust me on this one.
His timing was perfect. Today was the day on which Slattery semiofficially stopped giving a damn. Spend the bureau’s money? Sure, the taxpayers can afford it. Bend the rules? Break them? Okay, break them in fucking half. Just make sure nobody gets hurt and remember the golden rule: Cover thy ass.
Slattery grabbed a yellow legal pad and a government-issue Bic pen. “National security, huh? That’s pretty serious stuff.” Each of them played the game superbly. By the time Slattery finished covering the long sheet of yellow paper with his notes, the pieces seemed to fit together neatly. Officially Slattery determined that there was not even hard evidence that national security had been compromised for him to go through the whole rigmarole of informing Washington. Instead, the best he could do—and he said this to O’Brien and Russo with a straight face—was provide limited support for an additional week. That way, if this did turn out to have serious implications, no one could accuse him of allowing national security to be compromised. And if it turned out to be something as benign as the mob trying to collect a debt, he could still defend his actions. It was all right there on the sheet of yellow paper.
Slattery would designate this a “preliminary investigation,” meaning they would be investigating to determine if there was anything worth investigating. It would cut down substantially on the initial paperwork. But limited support from the FBI is still quite impressive. Consider it the silver standard rather than the gold. In an effort to locate Columbia University Professor of Slavic Languages Peter Gradinsky before the mob found him, and determine why he had taken a hike, government resources would be employed on an “as available” basis. This wasn’t a full-court press; the bureau wasn’t going to take any agents off their current assignments to work this one. There were probably eleven hundred agents working in the New York office, and they were already busy conducting probably ten times their number of investigations, just about every one of which was deemed more important than this one. But memos would be circulated stating the basic facts with an enlargement of the yearbook photo. Support facilities would be available for transcriptions, translations, and basic research. Agents with downtime might be recruited to do some grunt work. O’Brien and Russo were satisfied. Thrilled, actually.
Obviously this was not a “Priority.” Not a whole lot was going to happen in a hurry. But normal investigative procedures would be taken: With the permission of a friendly federal judge, which would be easy to obtain once the catchall term “national security” was invoked, the Gradinskys’ telephone would be tapped. Based on available manpower, for at least part of each day—exactly which hours would be determined based on Grace Gradinsky’s patterns—there would be visual surveillance on the apartment, and when she left, she would be tailed. Another subpoena would be obtained, this one for a record of the telephone calls Gradinsky had made from both his apartment and his office; the numbers would be run through a reverse phone book to try to determine whom he’d called. All his recent credit card purchases would be examined and his accounts marked to ensure that the FBI would be notified immediately if his cards were used. Hotels and motels in the New York metropolitan area, with an emphasis on the lower-priced places where he might pay with cash, would be checked to determine if he had registered using his own name. His bank records would be subpoenaed to determine if he had made any sizable transactions, either deposits or withdrawals, within the past month. Car rental agencies would be contacted to see if he had rented a car. The professor’s photograph and a brief descriptor would be circulated throughout the NYPD, transit police, housing police, and all other local law enforcement agencies with a request to contact the bureau with any information about this missing person.
Accomplishing all of this could take several weeks, and Slattery felt confident that long before it was completed, Professor whoever would show up somewhere. Most probably alive.
The first action was getting a tap on his home and office telephones. Unlike bugging a social club or a mob hangout, this was pretty simple. Judge Margot Sklar signed a warrant that same afternoon. That night FBI technicians went into the basement of the Gradinskys’ building and located the telephone box. It was an old one, a rusting gunmetal-gray box overflowing with a rainbow of wires. It was the kind of mess that installers and repairmen referred to as “an electric circus.” Normally, unless a technician gets lucky, in a box crammed with as many wires as this one it would take more than an hour to locate and isolate the Gradinskys’ phone. But in this case the technician picked out the wire seconds after he’d opened the box.
It was the one with the tap already on it.